Best practices for Drupal beginners

When creating a page on aalto.fi, there are a few simple tricks that can help make the content more available and interesting to users. These practices can be used for articles, news, events and other common content types. This service page is in itself an example of these practices.

Firstly, every page has a Lead text. Lead text introduces your page to the reader and makes it easier to find the page in online searches. When creating a new page, there is also a separate field for the Summary of your page. A good trick is to write the lead text first, briefly describing the content of your page (2-3 sentences/short paragraph), and then shorten that to a 1-2 sentence summary. Lead text will appear right after the title of your page, while the summary will appear in liftups of your page. Do not repeat the title of the page in your lead text or summary.

You should also choose a Main image for your page, even if you choose to not display it there, like we've done with this page. Hiding the main image works well for service pages with instructions and lots of screenshots. The main image will still be shown in liftups and previews to draw readers to your page. You can see examples of this under the heading "More Drupal instructions" further down this page.

Once you have filled in the basic information, you can use several components to build your page. The most basic one is the Text paragraph component, used for the text that you are reading right now.

If you want to lift up news, events or articles, the general rule of thumb is to put the liftups at the end of the page. That way, the reader is guided to further readings once they have read your page.

You can of course lift up articles in any relevant places. Let's say you're mentioning a topic very briefly, but your page will not go into details on that issue. After this mention, you can lift up a page that digs deeper, for example by using the Single liftup component, like we've done here. This way the reader can jump right into that topic, if that is what they are interested in.

This also helps to break up the monotony of the text and will grab the reader's attention again.

That is all you need to know to create your first good Drupal page. Remember that less is more, so you don’t have to start adding other types of components unless you really have a need for them and know how to use them.

Once you have created some basic pages based on these best practices and feel more confident with your Drupal skills, you can start playing around with these components more and do your own take on them. There really isn't one right or wrong here as long as you trust your own experience.

Basic ingredients for building a Drupal page:

• Use a main image
• Vary the components
• Break up the monotony of long text by adding other components

One final tip is to try to look at your page from an outsider's perspective. Would a reader get the information they want simply by quickly scanning the page?